Personal Learning Outcomes from Teaching of Composition and Literature

Personal Learning Outcomes from ENGLC0862: Teaching Composition and Literature

     I’ve always had good ideas for classroom practice and after class work, but this class gave me the necessary background information to implement much more effective techniques.  Although many of the texts we read this semester were influential, there were a few that were particularly interesting to me.  This paper is an examination of how, I believe, those specific texts will influence my teaching into the future.

     The first I’d like to mention is Min-Zhan Lu’s “From Silence into Words: Writing as Struggle”.  This essay really layered complexity onto issues of how language is expressive of more than just what gets put down on a page.  Choosing to use specific words or dialects can be a choice, on the part of the writer, to align or distance him/herself from his/her own cultural social, political or racial group.  I don’t think I realized, prior to reading Lu’s essay, the idea that what I may perceive as a lack of proficiency with regard to utilizing Standard American English in a student’s writing could actually be a stylistic choice they are making to convey a deeper meaning.  This new understanding could help me help students to refine that stylistic choice so that their audience understands it as choice which will allow the reader greater access to the writer’s meaning.  I could also introduce the option of code-mixing in a single piece of writing such that the audience grasps the writer’s proficiency in both English language variants.  If the writer can successfully code-mix, readers will hold the writer in higher regard and be more willing to accept non-standard language as a choice made for a specific purpose.

     The second text I’d like to address is “Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts: Theory and Method for a Reading and Writing Course” by David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky.  I’ve never encountered such an extensive published curriculum.  This is an excellent resource that can be implemented as a whole or in part in the basic writing classroom.  The activities are heavily scaffolded which, in my experience, is a very good technique to improve overall production and accuracy in writing.  What interested me most was that many of the exercises had a time limit instead of a specified required length.  I’d love to enact that technique in my own classroom.  I’m not exactly sure what the effect would be but it seems like might be a good way to manage student anxiety about production.  I feel that whenever anxiety can be diminished, production will increase and, in many of my classes, a central theme is increased production.  I also agree with the authors that journals that aren’t graded or corrected are an excellent way to provide lo stakes writing opportunities.  There’s also a heavy emphasis on revision, peer review and discussion.  I was a bit surprised by the extensive nature of the reading but that could be modified for classes that have lower, or higher, reading comprehension.

     Finally, I’d like to mention the techniques documented in Christopher Weaver’s “Grading in a Process-Based Writing Classroom” and Frances Zak’s "Exclusively Positive Response to Student Writing".  I’ve always understood that overcorrection or inappropriate correction of student writing can be detrimental to a student’s progress; however, I haven’t always known how to address the problem.  These readings gave me some very good ideas about how to proceed in the future.  I really liked Weaver’s idea about restricting prescriptive corrections to particular formalized assignments rather than correcting all writing for both low and high order concerns. Zak’s article was also enlightening although I think that there would need to be further evidence gathered in order to really prove up her technique of only giving positive response to basic writers.  My own idea is to combine Weaver and Zak’s techniques to give exclusively positive response to drafts, free writing, journals and other writing that is assigned to increase production and reserve more prescriptive corrections for final drafts and assignments that need to have a grade affixed to them.

     Generally speaking, the content of the course gave me a different perspective about the problems that writers face and armed me with new techniques for effectively addressing those issues. I also picked up some very good lesson planning materials for reference in my own classes.

Resources for Teachers of Composition and Literature

excellent resource provided by Amherst College

Online Resources for Writers

Fascinating and useful.  Students can explore language variants both in text and audio.  This site can help with students who speak marginalized dialects.  It can help them understand that Stand American English is not necessarily better than dialects, just different. Could foster inclusion of "othered" students.
DARE

The Library of Congress offers classroom materials and professional development to help teachers effectively use sources from the Library's vast digital collections in their teaching.  The lessons learned here can help students with research techniques for all databases and CUNY libraries.

Library of Congress Education

Fantastic resource!  The website contains a series of short biographical films on New Yorkers.  Really interesting way to introduce ethnographic research.
NYorkers

   This is a website for K-12 but there are excellent resources for reading comprehension exercises and extension activities for a wide variety of texts.  Teachers can use some as is or follow the design with different texts.
Teachervision

Response to “Grading in a Process-Based Writing Classroom” by Christopher C. Weaver

     I really like the ideas espoused in this article.  I think that students are often so focused on their grades that they don’t experiment or feel free to explore different techniques that might improve their overall skill level.  If there’s limited time to work toward an assignment that will be graded, students will probably focus on what they feel the instructor wants and work toward fulfilling that perceived requirement.  While students need to be able to satisfy assignment criteria to progress in post-secondary education, they first need to establish a unique voice, a set of skills to draw upon and increase writing production overall. 

     The approach to grading that this instructor utilizes seems to allow for both experimentation in low stakes situations and the development of convention based, formalized skills.  While the students’ perception is that the instructor is grading only the formal elements of the writing assignments, I feel certain that there is evaluation of the entire exercise included in the cover letter grade.  This allows the instructor to offer prescriptive corrections related to the students adherence to convention while fostering an environment wherein the student is free to experiment.  It also allows students to work on developing critical reflection skills regarding their own writing and to document, for themselves, trouble that they may have experienced, what they liked or didn’t like about specific assignments and to work on the ability to self-direct their own process.

     This type of methodology can, of course, be modified in a number of different ways if the instructor of a particular class decides that different sets of conventions need to be addressed.  The important lesson here, I think, is that there should always be space for students to explore included in the classroom.     

 Collaborative Assignment Analysis

ENGL C0862

Introduction to Teaching

 Writing & Literature

Professor Barbara Gleason

December 11, 2014

Caitlin Geoghan

Justin Lokossou

      First-Year Composition classes are constructed with the intention of discussing and building certain skill sets that will allow students to become competent writers. WPA Outcomes refer to the set of goals that serve as a standard for which all students should have risen to by the end of the semester. This collaborative project was centered on students creating a narrative in the form of an educational brochure on a subject of their choosing. Students will use Google Drive and email as electronic mediums to communicate with one another and assemble their assignment. Students are guided through the information they want to ensure is in their paper, as well as given instruction on how to access the multimodal aspects of the assignment.     

Asking students to write a brochure stems from an interest in the growth of the student as a writer. The initial goal is for students to work on something they enjoy. When students work on projects that they find interested, they are more likely to perform better than if they were assigned a topic. Having students work in groups also helps improve the confidence of the students working together, particularly if those students have trouble with English as a language or are simply just having trouble transitioning into college. Focusing on subjects of interest and working with someone will take the weight off of the shoulders of many students who are daunted by the idea of having an assignment to do. Selecting the kind of writing a student has to do can also put a damper on or fire up their creativity. There is more room for creative expansion with this multimodal assignment than if students were simply asked to write a paper. Google Drive as the primary multimodal tool is very effective. Google Drive allows students to share information with each other via the cloud. Students could even work on the same paper at the same time by accessing the file via Drive. All changes are automatically saved to the file on Google Drive.

 The WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition requires that students have an understanding of and are proficient in utilizing multiple avenues towards creating, developing, and strengthening writing projects. Students are to learn to scaffold their work through several stages before they even begin the first draft. The primary goal for this assignment was akin to one of the goals listed in the WPA Outcomes statement, which is for students to “experience the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.” By working on this project using email as a main means of communication, students will learn how to both work independently and within a group. They will also be expected to learn to handle certain multimodal outlets. Appendix B helps students visually see how to access templates and upload them to Google Drive. This is particularly effective for those who are not computer literate and may be daunted at the prospect of having to do a multimodal assignment.

The assignment is carefully structured in order to ensure clarity on what the objective is. Scaffolding was a major aspect of this assignment in order to minimize the possibility of confusion and ease any difficult that students may have. A brief of the assignment is the first item that students are shown, followed by examples or possible subjects to use for the brochure. Sections 2, 2.1, and 2.2 are important because of how they guide the student down the various processes that come behind the first page of paper. The evaluation criteria is presented in the form of questions to help them develop independence. By asking these questions as they work on their projects, students will be able to reflect and review their own work, revising where needed.

This multimodal assignment requires students to construct an educational brochure on the subject of their choice. The work has been carefully scaffolded to stretch over the course of three weeks and contains an electronic component in the form of email and Google Drive. In addition to learning to write a well-structured educational piece, students are expected to be competent in working with templates on Microsoft, as well as using Google Drive for the purpose of collaborative projects. Students should also be able to evaluate their own work by using evaluation criteria to question whether or not they have completed every aspect of their project.

 Works Cited

"Council of Writing Program Administrators." WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition, Approved July 17, 2014. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Dec. 2014.